Electronic Book Review - jenny weighthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/jenny-weight
enThe Electronic Swarm of City and Selfhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/culturecache
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-02-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>There is a tendency to want to be more than human. The fantasies that challenge humanist terms and conditions tend to rely on either technology or magic, but the distinction between technology and magic is often blurred in interesting ways. While William J Mitchell, in <span class="booktitle">Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City</span>, is squarely unmagical in the means by which he argues we become cyborgs, the cumulative effects of all that he relates at least skirt wizardry.</p>
<p>This is Mitchell’s third book. [ <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/bit-sized">Marcos Novak</a> reviewed Mitchell’s <span class="booktitle">City of Bits</span> soon after its release in 1995.] Ever since humans started using tools they have been more than human, but the networks that now form an integral part of the worldwide middle class change the ways that we operate to such an extent that they impact our sense of who we are and what we can be. “I construct, and I am constructed, in a mutually recursive process that continually engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially extended cyborg” (39). Because of the networks that permeate and enable our interactions with the world, the extent of our power over the world is no longer contiguous with the reach of our physical bodies. Networks extend our material limits; they also alter the status of the objects we engage with. For example, money ceases to be material and becomes data accessed via terminals, so that we recognize the object as part of a process - a flow of credit and speculation - more readily now than when we just had cash.</p>
<p>Mitchell commences his book by philosophising about boundaries - the layers that separate us from the world. We interface with a layered material world reminiscent of an onion skin. Various types of material barriers dissolve as we gain more devices and networks that allow us to penetrate them. Some of these barriers are more bureaucratic than material; for example, immigration borders are permeable if you happen to be the right sort of person with the right sort of data. As a result, people in networked societies have multiple sets of overlapping relationships (17). Mitchell is more concerned with practical rather than psychological barriers. He does not, for example, suggest ways in which our new devices might surmount emotional distances. Thus, a lot of subtle human relationships escape his gaze.</p>
<p>Because our distributed networks are so new and evolving, Mitchell is obliged to spend a lot of time describing the hardware and software that make them possible. He outlines wireless and G3 (third generation), GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) systems, and other ideas that have barely left the drawing board. According to Mitchell, GPS and FM (Frequency Modulation) systems “represent the beginnings of an important new relationship between information and inhabited space” (124).</p>
<p>Because of our increasing ability to mate the material world to data about it via a combination of distributed information and portable devices, “physical space is acquiring many of the crucial characteristics of cyberspace” (129). Consequently, data is losing its strange virtual status. Instead we are able to interact with it as our situatedness in the material world requires. Thus, for example, we can determine the availability of car parking spaces enroute to the destination, or check restaurant menus beforehand. This development is freeing us from a dependence on site-specific information and therefore grants us a type of geographical freedom that is reminiscent of nomadic Tasmanian aborigines.</p>
<p>Mitchell’s many examples are not yet common but they are certainly alluring in their possibilities. For example eSuds is a system that allows users to know when the laundry machines are available in a college dorm; while self-made networking such as drug dealers’ and prostitutes’ instant messaging (146) help them meet clients and evade unwanted attention. Divorce by text messaging is also occurring (88). As a result, we are becoming “cyborg foragers navigating through electronically mediated resource fields” (159). Our networked city is changing the relevance and cultural cache of geographical proximity; its ramifications are reaching town planning and architecture, as well as ethics, law enforcement, and law breaking.</p>
<p>In an era of “electronically coordinated swarms” (209), movements of groups of people are coordinated on an ad hoc basis according to changing conditions; thus friends can rearrange group meetings and protestors can evade police barriers. Democracy can be a frightening thing for the authorities who have, in some instances, shut down networks to curtail citizens’ behavior.</p>
<p>Sometimes the cornucopia of Mitchell’s examples makes it difficult to distinguish significant trends from fads. <span class="booktitle">Me++</span> often has a rather techno-utopian tone. While the techno-utopianism can become a bit exhausting, it gives scope for Mitchell’s best rhetorical prose. At the same time, it occasionally slips into proselytising rather than description or analysis. However the rhetorical flights are some of the more fun parts of the book. He proposes a new tense called the “electronic present continuous,” which allows for near-simultaneous receipt of information regardless of geography (104) in whose grip the Western world currently resides.</p>
<p>Mitchell is trying to tie technological developments to concepts of community and humanity. He discusses Plato’s idea that a functioning community is one in which all members know each other face-to-face (approximately 5000 individuals). Furthermore, he considers Tönnies’ <span class="foreignWord">Gemeinschaft</span> (community) and <span class="foreignWord">Gesellschaft</span> (society), a distinction that he has some sympathy for (206). According to Mitchell, the problem is that “Gemeinschaft does not scale” (206) - that is, the intimacy of the small-scale societies cannot be maintained at the larger scale, and this precisely is the problem for the Internet. Mitchell suggests that we need to find new ways of conceptualising distributed networks without recourse to Tönnies and Plato, but he does himself not go so far as to articulate a new conception. The network is not just a global village; it is a different type of thing (207). We cannot withdraw to unambiguous home territories because now with so many ways of breeching the material boundaries that used to contain us, there are no longer home territories (208).</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Me++</span> is at its weakest when it is trying to come to terms with the political and social implications of distributed networks under the weight of so much diversity and innovation. A certain political blindness is possibly always going to be the bane of a book that deals with emerging systems and behaviours. Perhaps we will need to wait to see whether the networked city “settles down” well enough to be contained within a definitional theoretical framework.</p>
<p>One of the best sections of the book concerns our current global preoccupation - terrorism. Mitchell discusses in interesting and terrifying ways how both terrorists and their pursuers can use distributed networks effectively. The emerging state of globally distributed siege (178) can work at the level of information, as computer viruses attack the Web, and at the level of materiality, as with ongoing terrorist bombings.</p>
<p>The decentralised nature of these networks has served terrorists well. According to Bill Joy (cited in Mitchell 186), we face the possibility of knowledge-enabled mass destruction, and it is not enough to try constructing walls like those erected for the protection of medieval cities. Seige walls now come in flavours of data and software - and announcements by Bill Gates of his intention to wipe out spam.</p>
<p>Can law enforcement compete with the greater mobility that the networks allow?</p>
<p>Unapologetically written in the shadows of the collapse of the twin towers, <span class="booktitle">Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City</span> is certainly a book of its time. The question remains as to how well the book will survive what we all hope is a short-term encounter with worldwide terror.</p>
<p>This is a well written, well edited book which throws up many issues that will no doubt receive much more attention. If humans seek to be more than human, perhaps what Mitchell reveals is the extent to which our cyborgian existence paradoxically maintains and confirms our humanity. Whoever we are or become, these paradoxes are an inevitable consequence of what we have always been.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/jenny-weight">jenny weight</a>, <a href="/tags/geniwate">geniwate</a>, <a href="/tags/genni-wait">genni wait</a>, <a href="/tags/bill-mitchell">bill mitchell</a>, <a href="/tags/william-mitchell">william mitchell</a>, <a href="/tags/bill-gates">Bill Gates</a>, <a href="/tags/bill-joy">Bill Joy</a>, <a href="/tags/plato">Plato</a>, <a href="/tags/gemeinschaft">Gemeinschaft</a>, <a href="/tags/gesellschaft">Gesellschaft</a>, <a href="/tags/network">network</a>, <a href="/tags/subjectivity">subjectivity</a>, <a href="/tags/terror">terror</a>, <a href="/tags/community">community</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator747 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comLanguage ruleshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/programmed
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-01-28</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph"><a href="http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/" class="outbound">Sand resounds as long as a whale song<br /> passed along and around the waters of the<br /> world. Like a motherchild, she/they<br /> both threatened and succored by the<br /> coasts. Alone in the bay, rolling over and<br /> back beneath the moon, as</a></p>
<p class="epigraph">“whale.html” from <span class="booktitle">The ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span> (1999) by Stephanie Strickland and Janet Holmes ( <a href="http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/" class="outbound">http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/</a>)</p>
<p>Sometimes we don’t know what we author. Sometimes our authoring tools do a lot of writing on our behalf. In <span class="booktitle">The ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span>, there were probably three authors: the html editor being the third. Software is a genderless author: sexless but not without cultural implications and stereotyped assumptions. Networked and programmed media are as open to the striations of gender debates as any other type media. However, the peculiar and intense engagement with language which underscores networked and programmed media perhaps casts the production of such media in a new light.</p>
<p>Deena Larsen and I created a Flash-based interactive narrative called <span class="booktitle">The princess murderer</span> (2003). Because the work is highly interactive it required a lot of action scripting (the programming language incorporated in Flash). Increasingly we found the programming code seeping into the surface text. It couldn’t be helped: the world we created simultaneously existed on two levels: a surface narrative about an insatiable Bluebeard and his ferocious princesses, and a semi-subliminal narrative about performative textuality and world-creation. The act of writing code infested the act of writing narrative and vice-versa.</p>
<p>Could this have been a feminist act? To a certain extent, the surface narrative is a feminist one, an explosion of surreal sex and violence couched in a game/narrative with no real resolution. However, my own sense of <span class="booktitle">The princess murderer</span> as a “transgressive” text did not seem to be derived from the narrative. Rather I felt that I was treading on a male preserve - programming code - and appropriating it to “perform” the narrative. It was at that point that the programming code started to infest the narrative itself - any attempt to separate them seemed superficial.</p>
<p>What did end up becoming more explicitly a feminist act - the appropriation of programming code - became even more so after conversations with Christine Wertheim at CalArts, who drew to my attention a long tradition of women who used writing and language for private communications beyond the male domain. My appropriation of programming code had taken on ontological elements; not only did the code create a programmatic, computer based universe which users could interact with, but it referred to, and reprised interesting traditions in women’s spirituality. The medieval mystic tradition that Christine alluded to seemed to have come full circle in the semi-medieval narrative of <span class="booktitle">The Princess Murderer</span>.</p>
<p>Fear of reifying the machine as an entrée to metaphysical hermeneutics aside (which, as Victoria Nelson (280-284) points out, is an element of recent rhetoric surrounding the Internet and other computer-based media), the experience of creating <span class="booktitle">The Princess Murderer</span> leads me to speculation about women’s experimental uses of language.</p>
<p>Mez (aka Mary-Anne Breeze) ties experimental language to avatar creation and collaborative networking to explore complex and often contested political and social themes. The originality of her approach with its rich integration of the various aspects of her praxis has repercussions beyond aesthetics:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">When Breeze transformed herself into Ms. Post Modernism, she felt obligated to represent that with a description of a physical act of self-mutilation: cutting out one’s face so that it can be removed and replaced. Today, when Breeze posts to listservs, she posts under avatars that only exist for a few weeks or a few days, often reflecting a political or social issue on her mind, before she finally discards that avatar for a new one. The process of transforming her identity seems mundane and easy, just as it seems to anyone else who participates in these online environments long enough. (Reep)</p>
<p>Mez’s precursors in print fiction include Kathy Acker, <cite id="note_1" class="note">Among other works, Kathy Acker’s <span class="booktitle">Empire of the senseless</span>.</cite> whose surreal and terrible prose seems to have been semantically dismantled by Mez’s more technologically engaged praxis. Both stretch language and genre until only thin tendrils of reference to mainstream literature remain. These thin tendrils are even more nebulous in Mez’s case, since she distributes her work, and indeed, shares “ownership” of her work, in ways that exist beyond the scope of the capitalist print fiction industry.</p>
<p>Brian Kim Stefans and Darren Wershler-Henry raise the question about whether complexity of structure decreases a work’s ability to impart politically engaged messages. Stefans’ answer in part suggests that the energy and thematics of a text can be more greatly explored when a work is subjected to processes that challenge its discursive coherence (18). Such an approach seems common to many experimental women writers, both in and out of print. The obscurely exuberant femin/ism/ity of <span class="booktitle">The Stream of Life</span> (1989) by Clarice Lispector is a case in point. “The text is tragic but without despair,” writes Hélène Cixous in her introduction (xiii). There are ways of writing that can extend text into the universe; each of these authors finds her own way to achieve this.</p>
<p>Diana Reed Slattery’s print and online project, <span class="booktitle">The maze game</span>, is another example of women’s experimental use of language. The Glide language is described and depicted in the book, but it is also possible to compose poems via a Shockwave platform on her website ( <a href="http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/" class="outbound">http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/</a>) (unfortunately it is a little difficult to use). Glide is a hieroglyphic language, and thus becomes specifically suited to the affordances of the Internet:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The lily expressed its gratitude by teaching the Glides a secret, silent language. Breathing the raw pollen, day after day, the Glides listened as the lily bespoke itself through three shapes based on the gestures of their cupped hands at work: curved up as they scooped their pollen; curved down as they emptied their palms into the baskets, and joined together in the gesture of the wave. (Reed Slattery 2)</p>
<p>The combination of print and website promote the Glide language to the status of a virtually living language.</p>
<p>According to Ross Gibson, artists need to practice an “agile programming” which is “a method of writing and designing for ever-changing and complex needs and so you can evolve the operationality according to present, immanent and longer term probable needs” (Gibson [my paraphrase]). Writers and artists have worked out ways to manipulate both natural and formal languages to create a liminal “in-between” language/universe that is neither wholly programmatic nor wholly natural. This language affords the “agile programming” with the space to create a future not wholly beholden to the present. The existence of such space is perhaps an achievement in its own right, although how it relates to politics is unclear.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the myth of gender difference beyond the biological remains prevalent in the post-millennial, global culture. Whether the myths should be explicitly refuted and thus perhaps accidentally perpetuated, or whether engaging in an art practice which, by tangential example, hopefully reveals the shallowness of gender stereotypes is an issue that exercises my mind. At least in this context, I am taking the former option. Thus, I want to raise some of the gender stereotypes that seem to float about in talk about networked and programmed artforms:</p>
<p>* women like to build community; men are goal-directed</p>
<p>This rhetoric particularly flavours discussion of women and computer games. Apparently <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> and <span class="booktitle">EverQuest</span> are “female” games unlike <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> or <span class="booktitle">Quake</span> because the former games allow women to explore community and interpersonal relationships.</p>
<p>* women like characters, psychology and narrative; men like interactivity, shooting stuff and puzzle solving</p>
<p>As a result, women are supposedly less inspired by programmatic worlds that are more interactive than psychological.</p>
<p>* men are early adopters</p>
<p>Consequently, computer games and mobile phone companies gear their media to meet the demands of a young male with significant free time and spending power.</p>
<p>* women write prose and men write programming code</p>
<p>This distinction hearkens back to schooling stereotypes, in which women excel at humanities and men at the sciences.</p>
<p>* Men are “logical,” women are “emotional.”</p>
<p>It is indeed unfortunate that we must continue to celebrate examples of women who flout these stereotypes, but it seems that in our burgeoning media landscape, every time there is a new development, phallocentric ideology is there to appropriate it.</p>
<p>One of the most beautiful web-based projects I have recently viewed is <span class="booktitle">In the white darkness</span> by Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley. Inspired by victims of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, the work explores “the fragility and fluidity of memory from a subjective point of view.” The authors continue:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">From the pulsing dots of the background-interface different events can be started, played (and combined). In this process the experience of remembering and loss of memory can be re-created in the appearance and disappearance of words, pictures, animations and sounds. (Strasser and Coverley)</p>
<p>Gender issues dissolve in the face of this coherent, elegiac, interactive environment with almost hypnotic appeal and pacing. I guess my idealistic hope is that one day we won’t need to write articles such as this one.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Acker, Kathy. <span class="booktitle">Empire of the senseless</span>. New York: Grove Press, 1988.</p>
<p>Geniwate and Deena Larsen. <span class="booktitle">The princess murderer</span>. The Iowa Review (2003). <a href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/june03/larsen_geni/prin.html" class="outbound">http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/june03/larsen_geni/prin.html</a></p>
<p>Gibson, Ross. “New models of collaboration.” Panel: <span class="booktitle">Empires, ruins and networks: art in real time culture</span>, ACMI. Melbourne, 2-4 April 2004.</p>
<p>Lispector, Clarice. <span class="booktitle">The Stream of Life</span>. Foreword by Hélène Cixous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989.</p>
<p>Nelson, Victoria. <span class="booktitle">The secret life of puppets</span>. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University P, 2001.</p>
<p>Reed Slattery, Diana. <span class="booktitle">The maze game</span>. Kingston, NY: Deep Listening publications, 2003.</p>
<p>Reep, John “Re: the fact that I am fiction: Mary-Anne Breeze, her avatars, and the transformation of identity” in <span class="journaltitle">Post Identity</span> 4.1 (Spring, 2004) <a href="http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/" class="outbound">http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/</a></p>
<p>Stefans, Brian Kim. <span class="booktitle">Fashionable noise: On digital poetics</span>. USA: Atelos, 2003.</p>
<p>Strasser, Reiner and M. D. Coverley <span class="booktitle">In the white darkness</span>. non_finito. 2004. <a href="http://nonfinito.de/ii/" class="outbound">http://nonfinito.de/ii/</a></p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie and Janet Holmes. <span class="booktitle">The ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span>. Word Circuits, 1999. <a href="http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/" class="outbound">http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/</a></p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/geniwate">geniwate</a>, <a href="/tags/geni-wate">geni wate</a>, <a href="/tags/jenny-weight">jenny weight</a>, <a href="/tags/stephanie-strickland">stephanie strickland</a>, <a href="/tags/gender">gender</a>, <a href="/tags/femini">femini</a>, <a href="/tags/gender-politics">gender politics</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-holmes">Janet Holmes</a>, <a href="/tags/deena-larsen">Deena Larsen</a>, <a href="/tags/flash">Flash</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/christine-wertheim">Christine Wertheim</a>, <a href="/tags/victoria-nelson">Victoria Nelson</a>, <a href="/tags/mez">mez</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-anne-breeze">mary-anne breeze</a>, <a href="/tags/kathy-acker">kathy acker</a>, <a href="/tags/brian-kim-stefans">brian kim stefans</a>, <a href="/tags/darren-wershler-h">Darren Wershler-H</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1083 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/programmed#comments